Let us now praise the White Sox bleachers. A world unto itself, and a little crazy this year.

The bleachers at Guaranteed Rate Field stretch from Section 160 to Section 164. Relatively minor real estate. About 2,500 seats in a ballpark that holds 40,615. I used to think of the bleachers as stretching from the Kids Zone in left field to the giant Goose Island goose in right, the length of the outfield, but technically, the bleachers are those rows of green benches in left, between the bullpen and that tasteful cascade of foliage.

Somehow, this White Sox season, it just seemed bigger.

Louder, rowdier, grosser, stranger, but also warmer, familial, exuberant.

A neighborhood of its own.

Regardless of what happens to the White Sox postseason, before the last out is barked and thoughts turn to 2022, let us now praise the White Sox bleachers. This is a love letter, nothing less. True, the bleachers seemed to be the site of nearly every major fight at Guaranteed Rate Field since spring. Yes, that was a man you saw there chugging beer out of an old Air Jordan. And sure, when I approached an usher and asked about the bleachers, he whispered, with genuine awe in his voice and broad roll of his eyes, “It’s been crazy out here, sometimes in a great way, sometimes in a Jerry Springer way.”

But culturally?

This season, the bleachers at Guaranteed Rate Field — among the cheapest seats in Chicago sports — have been a reminder of a time when big league sports also reflected a wider community, available to anyone, regardless of wealth or class. (Among the season’s off-field successes was the “Bleachers & Brews” promotion, offering one metal seat for $25, including two free beers.) The bleachers have been a reliable electricity source in a charged fandom. (For the last regular season game, White Sox pitcher Liam Hendriks and wife, Kristi, bought the bleachers giant foam No. 1 fingers, as thanks.) But also, the bleachers at Guaranteed Rate have become a link between past and present.

“There’s an esprit de corps in the bleachers these days,” said Richard Lindberg, a local historian and author of five books on the White Sox. “There’s a spirit back there that kind of captures what bleachers were at the old Comiskey Park — but with a better view. I have to say, they are evoking memories in me of when Comiskey was known as the world’s largest outdoor saloon.”

I spent a fair amount of time in the bleachers this past season, partly because I had heard from several regulars that the bleachers at Guaranteed Rate Field had become what the bleachers at Wrigley Field once represented, a crossroads between rich and poor, ride-or-die soldiers and casually curious — the image, in a sense, of what a day at a major league ballpark once promised, before tickets required a financial commitment, when the hope was a socially diverse fandom, nearly everyone drunk by the fifth inning.

So of course I waded in.

Why are you here, I asked.

“If you’re not sitting in bleachers here, where you at?” said Sammy Rios, 26.

“The nice thing is stadium announcers don’t have to fake scream that ‘MAKE SOME NOISE’ thing anymore,” said Claire O’Connor. “We can get pretty loud on our own.”

Anthony Quetzalcoatl, splayed out in on a bench during his day off from Midway Airport, looked across the bleachers: “I like these seats best. I’m with my people here. It’s a relaxed day and since these are not seats” — he mimed being constricted — “I don’t feel confined.”

Amanda Schall sat in the front row of the bleachers, reading a thick fantasy novel, feet on a concrete divider, waiting for a Thursday afternoon game in September to start. A nothing game. The White Sox were a comfortable 12½ games up in first place in their division. Schall’s a research administrator at Lurie Children’s Hospital. She escapes periodically to the bleachers “as an act of self-care.” Her family has had season tickets in the bleachers for decades, at Comiskey, at Guaranteed Rate. Partly, it was cheaper. But she came to love the view, of left field, the back of the pitcher, the hitter pointed at you. She remembers her father cupping hands over her ears to muffle explosions of curses in the bleachers. “I’ve spent generations back here. You get real people. Back here, nobody got company tickets. They’re not here out of corporate duty.”

Back here, she’s found a community within a community.

She’s been surrounded several dozen members of a plumbers union. Back here, she’s usually flanked by a handful of armchair sports historians and at least one retired IT guy.

That’s Mike Bojanowski, who’s been coming to White Sox games for 50 years. He sits at the front of the bleachers with a pencil and score card. He likes it back here, but wonders about a drift into “general rudeness in the bleachers — I doubt it’s ultimately good.” He wonders if part of the reason for the rowdiness in the bleachers this season came from what he calls “one-offers” — people who kind of like baseball, think it might be fun to see a game but don’t attend regularly and, therefore, don’t know how to act.

Behind him, several rows back, a very drunk guy yells, “Bring us to the promised land!”

As if making it to postseason were in question.

Never mind there’s no one on the field yet.

Bojanowski sighs but doesn’t seem to hear — that’s white noise back here.

Back here, at least during a late-season game before postseason, it’s chill, comparably. No one is out of control, the crowd is nearly stuffy for the bleachers. A security guard who looks just like Hank on “Breaking Bad” watches silently from the top of the section. A man below wears a T-shirt that reads “I Eat Asbestos.” Another wears a sombrero ringed in glitter. There are absolutely no children for as far as the eye can see and the ear can hear. A woman shoulders a beer beneath her chin while balancing two more in her armpits and finding her seat. A middle-aged man shouts at me that this isn’t “like the gentleman’s club they have in the Wrigley bleachers. We’re all working class Chicago!” He then tells me that unlike at Wrigley “where it’s all ‘Who’s winning? We winning? What’s happening?’ It’s all people here who all know sports.” Not really all. But OK. Don’t punch me. I hear two guys agreeing the White Sox have to win the World Series this year because it’s kismet, the last time there was a pandemic the White Sox won. That’s how the universe works. Which is almost Wrigley-esque in its ignorance: In 1918, during the last major pandemic, the Red Sox played the Cubs in the World Series, and the Cubs lost. But the year before, the White Sox beat the New York Giants four games to two. For the 1919 series, the White Sox lost to Cincinnati, the year of the Black Sox scandal. So at least they’re close.

Attendance back here has been great. It’s rare you see — even with a first-place team — those large patches of empty rows that infamously define upper decks of the stadium.

It’s almost as if fans have been making up for 2020, when the White Sox were decent but, pandemic aside, they never generated the kind of vibes they’ve had this year. Dave Diers, bleacher season ticket holder, interim department chair of the physical therapy program at Governors State University and brother of Schall, said he’s seen “slim years in the bleachers, without fights or issues. It’s as if you know (the White Sox) are good when, it’s a hot day, people have beer in them — it gets crazy.” Nearby, Matt Deneen, his score card in hand, soaking in the crowd gathering around him, told me: A good team means more time back here to get in trouble.

I’ll spare you the highlight reel — the headlocks, ripped shirts, heads slamming against seats, the wayward punching, screaming and wrestling holds that tumble over benches.

Seemed to happen every other game this year. Often enough that White Sox Dave of Barstool Sports took to his blog to renounce the ugliest of Bleacher Creatures: “Myself and a lot of other people have their season tickets in the (left field) bleachers and though they’re the best place to watch a baseball game by FAR in Chicago right now, the constant brawls between fat dudes and chicks are gonna force the White Sox into clamping down.” This craziness had just gone on one thrown nacho helmet too far.

White Sox Dave was right.

The hand-to-hand combat was attracting attention. Not so much those videos of guys falling asleep in the bleachers and having cups stacked on their heads. The ingenuity and joy of the bleachers was being drowned out. “And back here you have to admire the resourcefulness,” said fan Gregory Bim-Merle. “One game, someone found a way to sneak in a trash can then banged away at the other team. On a good night, it’s a party.”

It’s also very nearly tame, said historian Richard Lindberg, when compared to the infamous bleachers of the original Comiskey, which closed in 1990 for this stadium, initially named Comiskey Park, then U.S. Cellular Field, now Guaranteed Rate Field.

Lindberg said: “The old Comiskey bleachers were a haven for gamblers and every colorful weirdo you can think of. You could sit there for a buck, so a lot of unemployed people would hang out. That era is gone, so now it’s often younger people, families. Which was the idea. The (team) ownership in the early 1980s, they wanted to be done with the Friday Nights Fights (in the bleachers), the haze of cigarette smoking hanging in the air. They wanted family entertainment, but that got off to a terrible start, because people worried they were changing the character of the park, which was full of white ethnic South Side, Italians, Poles, Ukrainians, straight from the stock yards. There was a misperception that you could get assaulted going here. There were a lot of racial fears. And gradually that all kind of faded. The place became sanitized, more upscale. Now that carefree ambience of the old bleachers, I believe it’s returning after a long hiatus.”

It can be hard to spend $40 on a bleacher seat here.

Because of “dynamic pricing” — which factors in the day of a game, the visiting team, etc., before setting a price — the face value of tickets tend to wiggle all over the place. (A typical playoff ticket, if found, will probably not cost you $40.) But across town, at Wrigley Field, which has some of the most expensive tickets in Major League Baseball, bleacher prices often average more than double, triple the cost of White Sox bleachers.

The result, said Patrick Ramos, of the White Sox blog From the 108 — named for his own seats along the right-field line — “White Sox bleachers are now one of few places in Chicago that cuts across race, class and ethnicity, and actually resembles Chicago.”

Indeed, one night I attended, here’s what I saw in the bleachers:

A row of fans from Chatham.

A group from Pilsen.

A cluster from Bridgeport.

I met fans from Old Irving Park. Austin. River North. I saw two men in matching steelworkers polos, and a row of women in matching José Abreu jerseys. I saw porkpie hats, neck tattoos, dresses, cargo shorts, overalls. I often saw the day-off recline — arms outstretched, body tilted backward. I saw two people — two! — reading physical newspapers. Whenever a play was close, the section turned in unison, like eager geese, to see a replay on the scoreboard. What I saw was not overly rowdy or ugly but buoyant. At worst, charming pirate behavior. A man complained about his lemonade to a concession worker, and the whole row began taunting: “MY LEMONADE! MY LEMONADE!” Go back to the fancy sections, with its cupholders and bucket seats. Pretensions just will not do back here, in these green metal benches stretching section 160 to section 164, between bronze statues of Carlton Fisk and Paul Konerko, the finest seats in Chicago.

cborrelli@chicagotribune.com